Hemstede

Those places in the city that remain untamed and uncivilized (though not unsullied) after the passing of years are always the most interesting. We experience them as little rebellions, even though the city sometimes preserves them precisely because of this impression.

Take Hampstead Heath, that wilderness smack dab in the posh residential order that is northwest London. Famed by day for its role in inspiring many a Romantic poem and some excellent studies of trees, as well as providing a lovely backdrop for Marx's Sunday picnics with his family, one's first associations with it are utterly respectable. But eventually one learns that it is no less notorious by night as a cruising ground (this history is equally absorbing, although not nearly as well documented). That it is a pleasure ground in more than one sense is established sometime during the first meander- one is far more likely to tread upon an empty condom packet than some discarded verse.

Those who despair the Heath's duplicitousness seem to do so not for moralistic reasons, but on the grounds that the knowledge of its night life somehow infringes upon the sanctity and peace of the grand trees and the tall grasses during the day. What they neglect to remember is that even before the discovery of that first discarded remnant of passion (only the 20th century allows us to describe it in this fashion) there was something suspicious, something (exhilarating?) in the air that the glory of the landscape did not quite account for.

So perhaps Keats did only wander peacefully around the meadows of the Heath and contemplate Fanny in the shade provided by the great chestnut trees. Then, again, who are we to say that she didn't accompany him?

The order of things

A few weeks ago I dreamt that I had dinner with Michel Foucault at a Chinese restaurant in Paris. As I was talking to him, I was feeling increasingly guilty for not having finished The Order of Things yet, though I’ve been carrying it around for four months.

And for two out of those four, I’ve been in Taiwan, and my Chinese is still execrable. This will all change, I hope, as of next Friday when I start taking bona fide lessons, but until now I’ve been picking my friends’ brains for vocabulary words and grammar rules — and I bring up Foucault because whatever I learn about Chinese grammar reminds me of him, and Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia that prompted so much laughter from him. For example: measurement words. There are certain words in Chinese that don’t have direct counterparts in English, but are necessary to indicate what kind of object is being talked about. Instead of saying “I want a guava,” for instance, you must say “I want [measurement word, meaning roughly ‘of those things there’] a guava.” There are measurement words for: people, books, things you can point to, and things that are small and stick-shaped (including pencils, chop sticks, and I suppose probably syringes and golf tees as well). Such a taxonomy! Straight out of Borges!

Also: two particularly fabulous pieces of Chinese lexis:

1) Astronaut: tài kōng rén, which literally means something like “great space person.” My students taught me this word and find my pronunciation of it hilarious.

2) The characters for “sun” and “moon” put together mean “light”; “light” in combination with the character for “book” means “instruction manual” — literally, sun-moon-book.